.j. poet

John Santos has been playing congas, cajón, timbales and dozens of other percussion instruments for most of his life. The Bay Area’s music scene...

Lark in the Morning is a Berkeley store featuring over 1,500 instruments from around the world, many of which are handmade by craftspeople, and is owned by Eric Azumi, a musician and businessperson who bought the store to fulfill his passion for music.

In the mid-’60s, The Fillmore Auditorium and the Family Dog’s Avalon Ballroom became ground zero for the psychedelic rock revolution. Bill Graham began booking...

Manning Music bills itself as a community of teachers and musicians who love bluegrass, old-time, fiddle and acoustic music. At present, the Berkeley-based school...

Alexis Harte said his latest song, “Your Rose Garden,” was inspired by an evening he spent in Berkeley’s Rose Garden. “I grew up in...

Alphabet Rockers is a community-based children’s music project helmed by Kaitlin McGaw and Tommy Shepherd. With the help of a group of collaborators—some of...

Naima Shalhoub’s first album of original material, Siphr, covers a lot of emotional, geographical and musical ground. It plays like a suite and includes arrangements that draw on Middle Eastern and American modes. It also includes her reinvention of “Lamma Bada Yatathanna,” a song from Moorish Spain that’s more than 1,000 years old. The music was recorded in San Francisco, but Shalhoub said the idea behind it began brewing a few years before, during a trip to Lebanon, her parents’ birthplace.

The album has a larger-than-life sound, with bedrock rhythms complimented by washes of steel guitar and reverberating electric guitars that take up an immense sonic space.